Michaela Büsse: Vacant Futures

Visions of the urban future proliferate across planning documents, architectural competitions, policy frameworks, and marketing brochures: vertical gardens climbing high-rises, seamless systems for climate and energy management, autonomous mobility, waterfront promenades animated by cosmopolitan leisure. These images promise sustainability and connectivity, yet remain curiously placeless, detached from the messy realities of local conditions and material constraints. Emerging from global circuits of capital and design, they project a universal aesthetic of progress in which the future appears inevitable, simply awaiting construction.

But what happens when these futures stall, collapse, or are never inhabited? What remains when smart cities fall silent, when speculative developments halt mid-construction, or when infrastructures persist without users? Vacant Futures turns to abandoned landscapes, unintended habitats, and uncanny urban shells—the residues of ambitious plans that never fully arrived. Through filmic, visual, and research-based works, the exhibition probes eco-smart cities as promises, failures, and terrains where unexpected forms of life emerge.

Central to this inquiry is the architectural render. More than a representational tool, the render is a speculative device that shapes belief, directs investment, and compresses aspiration into a single, hyperreal frame. In Vacant Futures, renders are juxtaposed with fieldwork material, exposing the gap between projection and lived reality.

At its core are two films by Michaela Büsse: Overcast (2025), set in the largely deserted Forest City in Johor, Malaysia, and White Elephant (2022), filmed at the stalled Melaka Gateway reclamation project. Both trace the contradictions of speculative urbanism. In their suspension, these sites become landscapes of haunting as well as persistence, where animals, plants, and people repurpose spaces never meant for them.

By tracing the city from polished render to mined riverbed, Vacant Futures foregrounds the aesthetics, materialities, and politics of speculative urbanism. It asks: What futures are imagined, who are they for, and what possibilities arise when they fail to arrive?

Michaela Büsse is an interdisciplinary researcher, filmmaker, and postdoctoral fellow at TU Dresden. Her work explores environmental speculations and emerging material and territorial configurations in the context of planetary urbanization and the climate crisis. Drawing on visual ethnography and field-based inquiry, she investigates how future imaginaries are materialized—and often unsettled—through architectural, ecological, and technological interventions. Büsse’s work has been presented internationally in academic, artistic, and curatorial contexts.